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Read Ebook: Neither Here Nor There by Herford Oliver
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Ebook has 496 lines and 24977 words, and 10 pages
PAGE THE SECRET 9
OUR LEISURE CLASS 13
CONCERNING REVOLVING DOORS 17
BOLSHEVISM FOR BABIES 21
THE TUTTI-FRUTTI TREE 25
THOSE BILL BOARDS 28
THE LURE OF THE "AD" 33
LOOK BEFORE SHE LEAPS 37
THE LOW COST OF CABBING 42
THE GREAT MATCH BOX MYSTERY 45
ARE CATS PEOPLE? 51
MLLE. FAUTEUIL 56
MONEY AND FIREFLIES 60
CONCERNING THE TROUSER-CREASE 63
AN OLD-FASHIONED HEAVEN 68
ANOTHER LOST ART 71
MR. CHESTERTON AND THE SOLILOQUY 74
BUNK 77
THE COST OF A PYRAMID 82
WALTZING MICE AND DANCING MEN 87
THE HOBGOBLIN 92
THE VOICE OF THE PUSSY-WILLOW 96
PERNICIOUS PEACHES 99
SECOND CHILDHOOD'S HAPPY HOUR 105
PITY THE POOR GUEST OF HONOUR 109
A NEW MONROE DOCTRINE 114
DO CATS COME BACK? 117
THE RUTHLESSNESS OF MR. COBB 120
MY LAKE 123
THE HUNDREDTH AMENDMENT 134
SAY IT WITH ASTERISKS 144
NEITHER HERE NOR THERE
THE SECRET
Eve was bored. She confided the fact to the Serpent.
"Tell me something new!" she wailed, and the Serpent--he had never seen a lady cry before--was deeply moved and--there being no National Board of Censors--told her everything he knew.
The Dramatic Critic asks the same question on the first night of a new Play--"Will there never be an end to these Dormitory Farces," he moans, pondering darkly the while how he may transmute its leaden dullness to the precious gold of a scintillating paragraph.
Father Time has nothing to say on the matter. If you ask him to show you a new thing, he shrugs his wings and growls, "You can search me." Things old and things new are all alike to Father Time.
Peradventure, in the uttermost recess of the Great Pyramid lies a hair of an unknown color, or a blueprint of the fourth dimension, or better still the ms. of a new play, or a joke that has never been cracked.
When a Roman bath is unearthed in Kent or a milliner's shop in Pompeii we wait breathless to hear of the discovery of a new story, or a new dress pattern, but always it is the same old skull, the same old amphora.
Even the newness of Fashion is a jest of antiquity.
In an Italian book printed in the sixteenth century is a story of a fool "who went about the streets naked, carrying a piece of cloth upon his shoulders. He was asked by some one why he did not dress himself, since he had the materials. 'Because' replied he, 'I wait to see in what manner the fashions will end. I do not like to use my cloth for a dress which in a little time will be of no use to me, on account of some new fashion.'"
There may be a newer version of this story in the ashes of the Alexandrian library or beneath the ruins of Babylon, but this has at least the freshness and luster of its four-hundred years. Also it throws a light, a very searchlight, on the translucent demoiselles of today
OUR LEISURE CLASS
Once--and not so terribly long ago at that--we used to be very fond of telling ourselves that in America we have no Leisure Class.
That there were people of leisure in our midst, we could not deny, though we preferred to call them idle rich, but as for a special class whose whole business in life was to abstain from all useful activity--oh, no!
Even our idle rich, unblest as they are with the hereditary gift for idling, and untaught save by a brief generation or two of acquired experience, find the profession of Leisure a strenuous not to say noisy task, for while those to the leisure born know by the very feel of it that the habit of idleness is a perfect fit, the newly-idle must look for confirmation in the mirror of public admiration; hence Publicity, the blare of the Sunday Supplement.
But taken as a class our idle rich is at best an amateur aristocracy of leisure. For the real thing, for the genuine hunting, sporting, leisure-loving American aristocracy, we must go back to the aboriginal Red Man.
And how the busybody Puritan hated the Indian! With his air of well-bred taciturnity, his love of sport, of rest, of nature, and his belief in a happy Hereafter, the noble Red Man was in every respect his hateful opposite, yet if any Pilgrim brother had dared even to hint that the Indian might have points of superiority it would have been the flaming woodpile for him, or something equally disagreeable in the purifying way.
How different it might have been!
If only the Puritan had been less stuck up and self-righteous, the Red Man less reserved! If they could but have understood that Nature intended them for each other, these opposites, these complements of each other.
Why else had Nature brought them together from the ends of the earth?
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